2011 iOS sales surpass every Mac ever sold

No matter what you think of iOS devices, this is a very impressive statistic. Apple sold more iOS devices last year alone that it has ever sold in the Mac line during the 28-year history of the product. The chart you see here illustrating this statistic comes from Asymco, with some of the data apparently coming from Apple’s Tim Cook. Apple sold 140 million Macs with some form of OS X so far since the Mac brand was launched.

The number of iPads sold since the tablet launched is 55 million. The number of iPods listed as sold since they came on the market is 22 million. Since the iPhone launched Apple has sold 175 million of them with 37 million of that number coming the last quarter alone. All totaled, those numbers add up to 316 million iOS devices sold by the end of 2011 with 122 million collective Mac computers sold through 2011.

Asymco claims that so far since the iOS platform launched 316 million total units were sold as of the end of last year. The company also claims that in 2011 156 million iOS devices were sold, putting iOS at 34 million more units sold in 2011 than Macs sold in history. Asymco is presumably taking its numbers from Apple’s quarterly financial reports. The only caveat we see is that sales of the iPod touch are not broken out from sales of iPods that don’t run iOS.